Sheila Evans – författare

It’s hard enough to have your mate die suddenly, but even harder to discover that he had a second life, which included a mistress, and that their estate was largely depleted because of his gifts to his paramour.  Peg must put herself back together again and do it rapidly. With beautifully worded insights, Sheila Evans has created a multi-faceted character, one that you can root for, a woman who has been dangerously out-of-touch with herself but summons up, with courage, self-deprecation, and humor, the ability to reinvent herself.

In the early 20th century, the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, were incredibly dangerous, deafeningly loud sweatshops powered by the desperate labor of exhausted immigrants. When the mill owners callously slashed wages by a few pennies in the dead of a freezing winter in 1912, they expected the women to quietly accept it. Instead, they sparked one of the most brilliant and successful labor uprisings in American history. Known as the "e;Bread and Roses"e; strike, this book analyzes the ingenious, decentralized tactics deployed by over 20,000 striking workers from fifty different countries. Because the police and state militia routinely beat stationary protesters, the women invented the "e;moving picket line,"e; forming an endless, looping human chain around the mills that completely paralyzed operations without breaking the law against loitering. We explore the brutal corporate retaliation, the national outrage when police attacked children at a train station, and the profound strategic victory that forced the entire New England textile cartel to surrender. Study the blueprint of modern industrial defiance. Discover how a fractured group of impoverished immigrant women physically outmaneuvered the armed might of American capitalism.